Usually when we partake in the almost mandatory discussions of ‘who won E3?’, the talk is more often than note pared down to the E3 pressers of the big 3 (also known as ‘the big cheeses’) – Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. And while the latter left us underwhelmed with their less than enthralling new console, the Wii U, and the former two had little to show (okay, Sony had some interesting exclusives – more on those later in the week), it was actually a 3rd party pub/dev who caused the most E3 chatter at the LA electronics convention.

Ubisoft have now formally announced a game called ‘Watch Dogs’, in a high-tech third person sandbox game that riffs from Grand Theft Auto and has distinct hints of both Deus Ex Human Revolution, and more recently, Syndicate.

From what we can tell from the 9+ minutes worth of footage on offer, the protagonist of Watch Dogs is some sort of hitman/tech expert who is assigned targets. To eliminate them he can employ a range of electronic hacking – from crashing cars by changing traffic lights to gaining access to locations by disabling phones and causing distractions – two things we see happen in the Watch Dogs E3 trailer.

The graphics look slick and well put together (which is an understatement if you watch the Watch Dogs E3 gameplay trailer in 1080p in the YT player below), the gameplay looks stylish as ever and the story is as intriguing as you’ll ever get. Perhaps most surprising of all of this is that developer Ubisoft Montreal managed to keep the game under wraps until now.

Watch Dogs looks like a truly exciting game so we’ll be keeping you updated during the run up to the game’s release date next year.